* Formtastic 1.x is compatible with both Rails 2 and 3, and is being maintained for bug fixes in the the "1.2-stable branch":https://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic/tree/1.2-stable. View the README in that branch for installation instructions, etc.

* Formtastic, much like Rails, is very ActiveRecord-centric. Many are successfully using other ActiveModel-like ORMs and objects (DataMapper, MongoMapper, Mongoid, Authlogic, Devise...) but we're not guaranteeing full compatibility at this stage. Patches are welcome!

I also wrote the accompanying HTML output I expected, favoring something very similar to the fieldsets, lists and other semantic elements Aaron Gustafson presented in "Learning to Love Forms":http://www.slideshare.net/AaronGustafson/learning-to-love-forms-web-directions-south-07, hacking together enough Ruby to prove it could be done.

Rails 3.1 introduces an asset pipeline that allows plugins like Formtastic to serve their own Stylesheets, Javascripts, etc without having to run generators that copy them across to the host application. Formtastic makes three stylesheets available as an Engine, you just need to require them in your global stylesheets.

Conditional stylesheets need to be compiled separately to prevent them being bundled and included with other application styles. Remove @require_tree .@ from application.css and specify required stylesheets individually.

To specify the order of the fields, skip some of the fields or even add in fields that Formtastic couldn't infer. You can pass in a list of field names to @inputs@ and list of action names to @actions@:

If you have more than one form on the same page, it may lead to HTML invalidation because of the way HTML element id attributes are assigned. You can provide a namespace for your form to ensure uniqueness of id attributes on form elements. The namespace attribute will be prefixed with underscore on the generate HTML id. For example:

Customize HTML attributes for any input using the @:input_html@ option. Typically this is used to disable the input, change the size of a text field, change the rows in a textarea, or even to add a special class to an input to attach special behavior like "autogrow":http://plugins.jquery.com/project/autogrowtextarea textareas:

Customize the HTML attributes for the @<li>@ wrapper around every input with the @:wrapper_html@ option hash. There's one special key in the hash: (@:class@), which will actually _append_ your string of classes to the existing classes provided by Formtastic (like @"required string error"@).

Many inputs provide a collection of options to choose from (like @:select@, @:radio@, @:check_boxes@, @:boolean@). In many cases, Formtastic can find choices through the model associations, but if you want to use your own set of choices, the @:collection@ option is what you want. You can pass in an Array of objects, an array of Strings, a Hash... Throw almost anything at it! Examples:

Formtastic has some neat I18n-features. ActiveRecord object names and attributes are, by default, taken from calling @@object.human_name@ and @@object.human_attribute_name(attr)@ respectively. There are a few words specific to Formtastic that can be translated. See @lib/locale/en.yml@ for more information.

*Note:* This is perfectly fine if you just want your labels/attributes and/or models to be translated using *ActiveRecord I18n attribute translations*, and you don't use input hints and legends. But what if you do? And what if you don't want same labels in all forms?

Formtastic supports localized *labels*, *hints*, *legends*, *actions* using the I18n API for more advanced usage. Your forms can now be DRYer and more flexible than ever, and still fully localized. This is how:

_Note: Slightly different because Formtastic can't guess how you group fields in a form. Legend text can be set with first (as in the sample below) specified value, or :name/:title options - depending on what flavor is preferred._

To create your own new types of inputs based on existing inputs, the process is similar. For example, to create @FlexibleTextInput@ based on @StringInput@, put the following in @app/inputs/flexible_text_input.rb@:

By default, Formtastic escapes HTML entities in both labels and hints unless a string is marked as html_safe. If you are using an older rails version which doesn't know html_safe, or you want to globally turn this feature off, you can set the following in your initializer:

* "rspec":http://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec/, "rspec_hpricot_matchers":http://rubyforge.org/projects/rspec-hpricot/ and "rcov":http://github.com/relevance/rcov gems (plus any of their own dependencies) are required for the test suite.

For significant changes, you may wish to discuss your idea on the Formtastic Google group before coding to ensure that your change is likely to be accepted. Formtastic relies heavily on i18n, so if you're unsure of the impact this has on your changes, please discuss them with the group.

The project is hosted on Github: "http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic":http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic, where your contributions, forkings, comments, issues and feedback are greatly welcomed.